John Major Jenkins (born 1964)[1] is an American author and independent researcher, best known for his works that theorize certain astronomical and esoteric connections of the calendar systems used by the Maya civilization of pre-ColumbianMesoamerica. His writings are particularly associated with 2012 millenarianism and the development of Mayanism in contemporary and popular culture, as an outgrowth from the New Age milieu. He is one of the principal people who have promoted the idea that the ancient Maya calendar ends on 21 December 2012 and this portends major changes for the Earth[vague].[2][3][4] He has self-published a number of books through his Four Ahau Press.

Jenkins considers scientific approaches to cosmology a byproduct of limited thinking. In Tzolkin: Visionary Perspectives and Calendar Studies, he writes, "I primarily wish to promote a visionary approach to these matters, as there is much more to the Sacred Calendar than can be seen with the rational intellect," and that these visionary perspectives "can more closely touch the spirit of the calendar" than does the anthropological literature.[5]:5

He claims that a higher state of consciousness and universal understanding exists, and that it is subconsciously present in modern humans through a primordial memory, but that these higher planes of thought were more easily accessible to humans of the remote past, such as the ancient Mayans[6]

Jenkins accounts for this access in Maya Cosmogenesis 2012: "From studies in iconography and ethnobotany, we know the ancient Maya radically altered their perceptions in order to have visions of the underlying nature of reality. They achieved this heightened awareness through the use of hallucinogens."[7]:112 Further, Jenkins believes players of the Mesoamerican ballgame as enacting a sacred drama in which they took on the role of “heroic semi-human deities” who, “through a kind of sympathetic magic” maintained the cosmic balance of the universe.[7]:137

Jenkins also maintained that, in order to accept and understand his cosmological theories, one must also accept the premise that the Mayan kings journeyed to “distant places,” and continuously “renewed” their kingdoms at specific points in the Mayan calendar.[7]:322 Jenkins is also a supporter of “The Lost Star” theory[8] which extrapolates the existence of a binary companion of the Earth’s sun based on a believed mathematical discrepancies in “earth wobble.”[9]